A Cynic Looks at Life eBook

But the advocates of agreeable pains and penalties
tell us that in the darker ages, when cruel and degrading
punishment was the rule, and was freely inflicted
for every light infraction of the law, crime was more
common than it is now; and in this they appear to be
right. But one and all, they overlook a fact
equally obvious and vastly significant, that the intellectual,
moral and social condition of the masses was very low.
Crime was more common because ignorance was more common,
poverty was more common, sins of authority, and therefore
hatred of authority, were more common. The world
of even a century ago was a different world from the
world of today, and a vastly more uncomfortable one.
The popular adage to the contrary notwithstanding,
human nature was not by a long cut the same then that
it is now. In the very ancient time of that early
English king, George III, when women were burned at
the stake in public for various offenses and men were
hanged for “coining” and children for
theft, and in the still remoter period (circa
1530), when prisoners were boiled in several waters,
divers sorts of criminals were disemboweled and some
are thought to have undergone the peine forte et
dure of cold-pressing (an infliction which the
pen of Hugo has since made popular—­in literature)—­in
these wicked old days crime flourished, not because
of the law’s severity, but in spite of it.
It is possible that our law-making ancestors understood
the situation as it then was a trifle better than
we can understand it on the hither side of this gulf
of years, and that they were not the reasonless barbarians
that we think them to have been. And if they
were, what must have been the unreason and barbarity
of the criminal element with which they had to deal?

I am far from thinking that severity of punishment
can have the same restraining effect as probability
of some punishment being inflicted; but if mildness
of penalty is to be superadded to difficulty of conviction,
and both are to be mounted upon laxity in detection,
the pile will be complete indeed. There is a
peculiar fitness, perhaps, in the fact that all these
pleas for comfortable punishment should be urged at
a time when there appears to be a general disposition
to inflict no punishment at all. There are, however,
still a few old-fashioned persons who hold it obvious
that one who is ambitious to break the laws of his
country will not with so light a heart and so airy
an indifference incur the peril of a harsh penalty
as he will the chance of one more nearly resembling
that which he would himself select.

V

After lying for more than a century dead I was revived,
dowered with a new body, and restored to society.
The first thing of interest that I observed was an
enormous building, covering a square mile of ground.
It was surrounded on all sides by a high, strong wall
of hewn stone upon which armed sentinels paced to
and fro. In one face of the wall was a single
gate of massive iron, strongly guarded. While
admiring the Cyclopean architecture of the “reverend
pile” I was accosted by a man in uniform, evidently
the warden, with a cheerful salutation.